TÜBİTAK MAM
Zeynep Kaya
Research Director
AGREFEST 2026 IS BUILT AROUND ONE SIMPLE QUESTION:
Can Turkish agriculture feed a warming country, on land that is shifting under our feet?
The systems we inherited were designed for stable rainfall, abundant labour and predictable supply chains. None of those hold anymore.
Water tables are dropping, soils are tiring, rural labour is thinning, and the climate is rewriting the growing calendar!
AgreFest is for farmers, researchers, founders and investors building food and farming systems where failure is costly, seasons are long, and the outcomes feed millions.
EGE UNIVERSITY
Soil Scientist
TOPRAK LABS
Founder & CEO
TÜBİTAK MAM
Research Director
ANATOLIA VENTURES
Investor
FARMHACK
Co-Founder
ANTALYA TARIM
Agronomist
The two non-negotiables. Sessions on regenerative practices, drip irrigation economics and watershed governance.
Resilient varieties, seed sovereignty, and the long, expensive game of plant breeding under climate stress.
Robots, sensors, satellites and the patient capital it takes to deploy them across smallholder Anatolia.
AgreFest is not designed for scale. It is designed to assemble the right people on a hillside in Şirince for four days. Attendance is curated across farmers, founders, researchers and operators working on Turkish agriculture under real constraint.
For visitors who can only join us for a single day of programming.
Four days of sessions, workshops and side events. Make your own way to bed.
Everything in Full Camp, plus a tent at Stoa Şirince and meals.
Four days in Şirince put me in a room with the agronomists, founders and funders I'd been emailing separately for two years. It collapsed a year of work into a weekend.
The format is unusually honest. People talk about what isn't working — water rights, labour, the actual cost of a soil test — not just success theatre.
I came as a researcher, left with three pilot collaborations and one co-investment with a fund I'd never met before.
